Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 7, 2000

2000-01-07 04:00:00 PDT DISCOVERY BAY -- That notorious Delta fog draped Discovery Bay like a damp, grimy shower curtain. It was the kind of morning that makes people want to stay inside, curled up on the couch with coffee and the paper. An excuse for sloth, in other words.

Yet there was Bonny Warner, bundling her 18-month-old daughter, Katy, in layers of fleece and fastening her hood. They were going out -- you bet they were. Mornings, they always walk over to the harbor of this eastern Contra Costa community to feed bread to the ducks. Fog, schmog; nothing was going to ruin their plans.

They navigated the sidewalks with care, Katy secure in the seat of her Little Tykes wagon and Bonny pushing from behind. A safer driver, it seemed, could nothave been found. Warner is, after all, a former three-time Olympian in the luge, a Boeing 727 pilot for United Airlines and now, at 37, training for a spot on the U.S. women's bobsled team for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. The national championships are this weekend in Park City, Utah.

"The duckies are waiting for us, sweetie," Warner said, pushing on. "They'll wonder where we are."

It was perhaps more important to Warner than it was to her daughter or the ducks that they stick to the schedule. Her time with Katy is precious. Later that morning, she had to drop Katy off at her sister-in-law's house in Livermore, then hustle to Oakland to fly a planeload of passengers to Denver, then get in a little weight training and aerobic exercise.

"It's the guilt factor," Warner said. "I'm gone so much, I want to make every minute together with her special."

Any working mother could relate to such a sentiment. But Warner's case is extreme. She doesn't just juggle career and family, she adds a third component -- Olympic aspirations. Not only does she manage to keep all of those metaphorical balls in the air, she makes it look, well, so darn easy.

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"That's what I thought, too," said Tony Simi, Warner's husband, who works as a San Ramon firefighter. "But when you're around her for a while, you'll see she's happiest with a phone in one hand, a pen in the other, Katy on her hip and her feet tapping away under the keyboard. She's got so much energy."

Warner's secret?

"Coffee," she said, laughing. "Everybody has to have one vice. Mine is caffeine."

It's more than that, of course.

What drives Bonny Warner? Her passion for her bright-red bobsled, and her desire to succeed. The best thing anyone can do for Warner is to tell her she cannot do something. She may look like a sweet soccer mom, with shoulder-length blond hair and striking blue eyes, but she can be ruthlessly competitive.

"She just keeps going and going," said Stew Flaherty, the financial force behind women's bobsled's inclusion in the Olympics. "Now that Bonny's jumped in with both feet, watch out."

Warner's latest quest is to qualify for the Olympics in a sport she hadn't even tried two years ago. Last month, she finished ninth in the first women's World Cup race, her first major foray into bobsledding. Only two U.S. sleds will qualify for the Olympics, and Americans Jean Racine and Jill Bakken are the top two ranked drivers in the world.

"I love challenges, and this definitely is one," Warner said. "I've only been in it a year, and I'm ranked in the top 10 in the world. Maybe I can do it. It's a goal."

How naive, how typically 14-year- oldish that sounds! Warner made that list in 1976, when the world seemed limitless to her, though others would have considered her home life daunting. Bonny, her sister and brother lived with their mother on food stamps. Joy Warner, her mother, was a schoolteacher on disability for an illness later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, so Bonny ran the household. She worked, cooked, cleaned, studied and played goalie on Chaffey's field hockey team.

One -- maybe two -- of those goals would have seemed feasible to an outsider. But now, 21 years later, Warner has accomplished all the tasks she set for herself, save building the log cabin.

How Warner accomplished those four goals is a case study in hard work, risk-taking and a little luck:

Nevertheless, money was tight. Bonny's parents divorced when she was young, and she says her father didn't help much financially. But Warner had that figured out, too. She says she chose a sport -- field hockey -- that provided partial college scholarships to "expensive" colleges such as Stanford. She would get the rest through loans and aid.

"Mom didn't want me to apply to Stanford, because she said we couldn't afford it," Warner said. "She was so adamant that she wouldn't even sign my application. So I forged it."

-- How she became an Olympian: Here's where equal doses of luck and risk-taking come in.

In 1980, as a freshman at Stanford, Warner, as a lark, entered an essay contest about the Olympics. She won and was chosen as a torch bearer for the Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., and then took winter quarter off from Stanford to attend the Games. While there, she tried the crazy sport called luge, where athletes, as she puts it, lie "on their backs on a flimsy sled, zooming 80 mph down an ice track with steep, banked turns."

She crashed, of course. But she liked the sport so much she stayed in Lake Placid to train until spring quarter began. She sold her Olympic pin collection to pay for her stay. She slept on the floor of the U.S. Luge Association office. She worked making sandwiches at Captain Billy Wizbang's Deli in exchange for a $450 sled owned by the proprietor.

When Warner returned to Stanford in the spring, her field hockey coach was curious about her plans. How could Warner simultaneously play field hockey, train for the luge, work part-time to pay bills and keep up a decent grade-point average?

"I wrote a 14-page 'term paper' explaining how it could be done and dropped it on her desk," Warner said. "She let me keep my scholarship."

The next year, 1982, Warner wanted to train in Germany, where the luge elite lounge. She had no money, though. Again, luck intervened. She was shopping with her mother one day, when she saw an Olympic-sponsored sweepstakes competition. She filled out the entry form in the clothing store, stuffed it in the box and forgot about it. There were nearly 2 million entries -- and Warner won. Prize money: $5,000, enough to go to Germany.

Warner basically just hung around the elite Germans until they took her in and trained her. Two years later, Warner was the U.S. national champion, the first of her four national titles.

She crashed in her 1984 Olympic debut in Sarajevo, but in the 1988 Games in Calgary, she placed sixth -- the highest finish ever by an American. She also qualified for the 1992 Albertville Games, finishing out of medal contention.

After Albertville, she retired from the luge. After all, she had other goals.

-- How she became an ABC broadcaster: It took Warner six years to earn her degree in broadcast journalism at Stanford, mostly because she kept taking personal leaves to compete.

She'd lost her state aid when she stopped being a full-time student, so she worked in a bank two hours a day after classes. She also lived a Spartan life in a two-room tractor shed with an outdoor toilet on a Palo Alto hillside.

Degree in hand in 1987, Warner landed a job fresh out of college at KGO-TV (Channel 7) as a sports reporter. Between editing stories, she would lace up her sneakers and race the cable cars up California Street to get in her workout for luge.

"I had a dream job at KGO," Warner said. "I got to pick my own stories. I never did football or baseball. There were other guys to do that."

-- How she became a United Airlines pilot: In her spare time -- when not reporting or training in the luge, that is -- Warner started taking private flying lessons. She was hooked.

"I always wanted to be a pilot," she said. "But it's great. Anyone can do it."

It does take skill, however, and Warner showed an acute aptitude for aviation. By 1989, she was a flight instructor at night and on weekends when not luging or doing TV reports. She was still paying off her student loans and spending her discretionary income traveling to luge events in Europe.

When Warner finally logged enough hours to apply for a commercial airline position, she realized that she would eventually have to leave the luge and TV behind.

"I knew I'd make a good pilot, because I have a multitrack mind," Warner said. "You have a lot of things to be in control of in the cockpit. I can juggle."

So what now, Bonny, the bobsled?

Life must have seemed rather sedate to Warner after she retired from the luge in 1993. Here's the Cliff Notes version of what Warner has accomplished in the past six years. She:

-- built her dream house on the water in Discovery Bay.

-- married Tony and taught him to fly light planes at the Byron airport.

-- was promoted from co-pilot to pilot for United, full time, and participated in a mentoring program for young aviators.

-- served as a board member of the U.S. Olympic Committee until 1996.

-- worked as a national TV commentator for the luge at the 1994 and '98 Olympics.

-- gave birth to Katy in 1997.

-- helped lobby the International Olympic Committee to get women's bobsled into the Olympics. (The IOC approved it in October).

"When I married Bonny, I knew I'd have to hit the ground running," Simi said. "She just never gets tired. She likes to keep busy."

Not content with just helping women's bobsled gain Olympic status, Warner became intrigued with the possibility that she might be good at this sport -- which is similar to the luge but uses a larger, more cumbersome sled and different steering skills -- and, heck, why not give the sport a go in her spare time?

"Last year, on my two-week vacation, we went to Salt Lake City and tried it," Warner said. "I had, like a lot of women, this paranoia of being huge after having a child, being out of shape. That was my first motivation -- losing weight."

Not for long, though. Warner isn't a dabbler. And she found during that fortnight in Salt Lake City that she had the sprinting ability and steering skill to be a good bobsled driver.

So last summer, Warner was back training in earnest for another Olympic bid, a venture that involves much sacrifice. The financial outlays for her training -- she keeps an apartment in Park City, Utah, where she trains six months out of the year, and she had to buy a sled for about $10,000 and ship it to Europe for competitions -- has sapped her savings. Tony sold his boat to help out.

In February, when the European bobsled season begins, Warner will have to take an unpaid leave of absence from United to compete.

Why try this, when Warner's day planner is already bulging with tasks?

"There's unfinished business from the luge," she said. "I never won a medal. If I can make the bobsled team, I'll be a medal contender, just by virtue of the fact that the No. 1 and 2 U.S. teams are top-ranked in the world."

Warner explained her motivation while sitting in the cockpit of a United 727 docked at Gate 3 of the Oakland International Airport. It was 10 p.m. on a Sunday night.

She had just flown in from Denver, after starting her day in Houston. During the three-hour layover in Denver, Warner worked out at a weight room under one of the runways at the airport. She would not get back to Discovery Bay until midnight, then would awake the next morning at 6 to pick up Katy at her sister-in-law's house in Livermore.

Then she would go to Castro Valley to work out with noted athletic specialist, Dr. Don Chu. She would return home Monday night, where Tony would be waiting after finishing one of his 24-hour shifts at San Ramon's fire department.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, Warner would be back in the cockpit of a 727, flying back to Denver.

When a visitor commented that she lives a dizzyingly busy life, Warner shrugged.

"I have a very understanding husband," she said. "I'm not home at night to cook dinner -- that's for certain. But I do get home enough to get the laundry done."

Simi said he senses an internal conflict in his wife. She wants to do it all -- be an athlete, airline professional, wife and mother.

"For the longest time, she wouldn't let me do the cooking, because she wanted to do it," Simi said, laughing. "But I eventually learned, and now she lets me. And I love spending more time with Katy."

Why not do it all? That's Warner's credo. So far, she said, no one has convinced her it can't be done.

"I have the same guilt any working mother has, especially in my job, which takes me away from home 24 hours at a time," she said. "On the balance side, when I'm not working (at United), I'm either at home, or Katy's with me in Park City. Next year, I'm taking a full five-month leave from United, hiring a nanny and taking (Katy) with me to Europe.

"It may seem impossible for a working mother to be an Olympic medalist in this day and age, when everybody's 25 and does nothing except train for their sport. Maybe it is. But the next step to get to that direction is possible. As long as that very next step is not impossible, I'm going to keep pushing."

Just like she kept pushing Katy through the fog to feed the ducks.

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